I know it’s not the fashionable thing to say but...
I think we’ve flattened the meaning of the word gatekeeping so completely that we’ve lost the distinction between exclusion and discernment, domination and protection, elitism and stewardship.
A gate is not only a barrier to entry.
A gate is also a threshold, and a threshold implies initiation.
This is the part I think we forgot. Not everything is supposed to be instantly accessible to everyone, all the time. Some things are sacred enough, powerful enough, complex enough, or consequential enough that they require preparation before being approached, taught, or transmitted.
That is not inherently impressive. Sometimes it is simply the most responsible thing to do.
I think part of the reason people are so spiritually fragile right now is because we’ve lost initiation almost completely as a culture. We’ve lost meaningful rites of passage. We’ve lost apprenticeship. We’ve lost the understanding that certain forms of knowledge require more than curiosity. They require readiness, integrity, discipline, sometimes years of study, humility, and the willingness to be irreversibly changed by what we’re approaching.
Instead, everyone is expected to have instant access to everything, all at once. Every ritual. Every tradition. Every indigenous medicine. Every esoteric teaching. Every identity. Every mystery. And the moment anyone questions whether someone is adequately prepared to hold that knowledge, or to lead with it, people call it oppression.
They call it gatekeeping, as if it’s a moral failing. But there’s a reason gates have guardians.
Ancient cultures understood this. Thresholds protect people. Initiation was never punitive, it was preparation. It made sure the person crossing had actually been affected by the process before being given access to what waited on the other side. It was never exclusion for its own sake.
I think of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid: you wax on, wax off before you learn to fight. You apprentice before you guide. You study before you teach. You carry water before you carry wisdom. You live through a thing before you claim authority over it.
But algorithm culture has inverted the entire process. Now the language of a thing is acquired before the lived experience of it. The symbols of initiation arrive before the actual descent has done its work.
Someone can watch ten TikToks, learn the language of trauma, nervous system regulation, indigenous ceremony, somatics, archetypes, shadow work, tantra, and immediately position themselves as a guide. Often it’s sincere. But sincerity is not capacity.
This is where we need to get honest. A person can have a powerful experience with medicine and still not be prepared to serve that medicine. A person can have a breakthrough in therapy and still not be prepared to guide someone else through the underworld of their psyche. A person can give birth and still not be prepared to hold that threshold for another woman. A person can study mythology, astrology, psychology, spirituality, and still not have metabolized those teachings into something they can ethically transmit.
Proximity is not initiation. Information is not wisdom. Access does not grant enlightenment. Having an experience is not the same as being transformed by it.
Proximity is not initiation. Information is not wisdom.
This feels especially relevant right now, because astrologically, we’re living through a profound shift in power, knowledge, and authority.
Pluto in Aquarius is radically democratizing everything. Knowledge, technology, platforms, esoteric teachings, alternative education, social influence, even the structures through which people gather and organize. Aquarius decentralizes. It networks. It cracks open broken systems and says: everyone gets access. Everyone gets a voice. Everyone gets a platform. Everyone gets to participate.
There is something genuinely liberating in that. Many lineages, professions, and systems have become corrupt, more interested in preserving their power than transmitting wisdom. There’s good reason to be suspicious of authority. There’s a reason the old guard is collapsing.
But every archetype has a shadow, and one shadow of Pluto in Aquarius is disembodied intelligence. Information without embodiment. Hive mind without lived wisdom. Just because something can be accessed doesn’t mean it can be understood. Just because something can be distributed doesn’t mean it can be metabolized. Power has been decentralized. That does not mean everyone is mature enough to wield it.
This is what I mean when I say we’re mistaking decentralization for maturity. Decentralization is structural. Maturity is developmental. Information can spread instantly. Character and discernment do not. A person can go viral overnight. That doesn’t mean their nervous system, their ethics, or their lived experience can hold the weight of the influence they’ve just been handed.
There’s a real danger in a culture where the gates disappear before the inner capacities have caught up. When external authority dissolves, and it is dissolving, internal authority becomes everything. As the old structures collapse, discernment has to move inward. When everyone has access to everything, the real question becomes: Who has the maturity to understand what they’re touching?
A decentralized world without inner authority, discipline, discernment, embodiment, and lived ethics does not become liberated. It becomes chaotic. Narcissistic. Spiritually ungrounded. It looks like a thousand people proclaiming themselves leaders, while very few have actually been forged by the responsibility leadership requires.
This is why Saturn and Neptune moving through Aries matters so much right now. They’re raising the question of embodied leadership instead of self-appointed leadership. Not leadership as branding, but leadership forged by experience. They ask: Do you actually have the integrity to lead this way? Have you actually undergone the initiation?
Because we’re living in a culture that has become remarkably skilled at dressing the part, speaking the part, photographing the part, and turning it all into content. We know how to adopt the identity of a mystic, a healer, a trauma-informed leader, an entrepreneur. But the image of transformation is not transformation.
Real initiation has a real cost.
The price is your certainty. Your old identity. Your illusions. Your egoic self-image, the version of you that wanted the title without the burden, the authority without the apprenticeship.
Initiation is a crossing. After it, you are not the same. This is why the return of gatekeeping is really the return of thresholds: processes that ask something of a person before they’re handed responsibility over other people’s bodies, psyches, births, grief, sexuality, trauma, or rites of passage.
The point of a threshold is not to tell you that you’re unworthy. It’s not rigid hierarchy, arbitrary exclusion, or hoarded wisdom. It’s simply asking whether you’re ready. And if you’re not ready yet, the threshold doesn’t shame you.
It initiates you.
This is what we’re missing as a collective. Not fewer gates. Better guardians. Less authority based on status, more built on responsibility. More initiation.
Some things are powerful enough to require preparation. Some knowledge will ask something of us before it reveals itself. Some forms of power require us to become someone new before we can wield them responsibly.
That is the kind of gatekeeping we need to bring back.
If this essay landed somewhere in you, Wild Mother is the threshold itself.
This September, in San Miguel de Allende, a small group of women will gather for several days of ceremony, ritual, and embodiment work held in community.
This one is specifically for women who feel motherhood calling them in the near future, whether you’re trying to conceive, preparing your body and life for it, or just feeling the pull and want to meet it consciously before it meets you. Wild Mother is not birth prep in the clinical sense, it’s about claiming sovereign motherhood before you’re thust into it. The body, the instinct, the authority that gets handed back to you when you stop asking permission to lead your own life.
You’ll be held in circle. You’ll move through rituals designed to ask something real of you. Co-facilitated with Ash to Ashes, the container is built for women who are done circling the threshold and ready to walk through it in sisterhood.
This isn’t for the just curious. It’s for the ready.
→ Read the full details and apply here
→ Submit your application